To this day Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the most widely adopted and conclusive tool for the assessment of product sustainability along its entire physical life cycle. However, LCA entails two major shortcomings: first, it exclusively assesses environmental sustainability impacts and therefore neglects the social and economic dimensions of sustainability. Secondly, it solely focuses on directly product-related processes and does not account for the broader context in which a product is manufactured, used or recycled. For those reasons, the purpose of this thesis is to go beyond LCA and develop a framework for product sustainability assessment in the context of a product’s system environment
In order to provide a solid conceptual basis, an extensive literature study of sustainability concepts and existing methods for product sustainability assessment (PSA) was conducted; sixteen identified PSA tools were critically evaluated with respect to their methodology and specific features. The systematical literature review, together with the identified research gap, constitute a contribution to the field of product sustainability assessment and served as a basis for the framework to be developed.
The framework for Product System Sustainability Assessment (PSSA) focuses on the assessment of active consumer products in their use phase. It is based on the concept of system levers, which aims to formalize the leveraging effects of the product’s system environment on product sustainability. The environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability, as well as the five identified dimensions of the system environment are specified in a top-down approach. Based on that, the final PSSA framework is composed. It provides a conclusive methodology to comprehensively capture the multi-dimensionality of sustainability and the complexity of a product’s system environment. A proof of concept is given based on a case study on battery electric vehicles in different local contexts.
The final conclusion of this thesis is the finding that product sustainability is not an inherent product characteristic, but a function of the product’s broader system environment. Therefore, product sustainability must be assessed from a dynamic perspective, to account both for temporal changes and interrelations between the product and its system environment and vice versaShow more